


These Great Fires

by bigdamnher0



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Established Relationship, Fire Accident, M/M, Mild Gore, Possession, Sexual Content, Supernatural Elements, fire demons, mild body horror
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-31
Updated: 2020-10-31
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:15:10
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27284017
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bigdamnher0/pseuds/bigdamnher0
Summary: “Hyung, I—“ he pauses. Mark’s eyes are swallowed by black. “What’s happening to me?”“You’re waking up,” Yuta tells him kindly, then swallows him down.
Relationships: Mark Lee/Nakamoto Yuta
Comments: 13
Kudos: 115
Collections: NCT Spookfest 2020





	These Great Fires

**Author's Note:**

> hey did you read the tags? cool cool cool cool. i tried to tag this to the best of my ability, but please do let me know if i missed anything. i don't know where this came from either; i wrote it freezing in a tent

🌖

Sometimes Mark gets like this, oddly contemplative, when Yuta twines their hands together without fanfare and lets the day unravel behind them. Sheepish, Mark poses the question by rote. _Why me?_

“Because,” Yuta answers simply. He collects their hands on his lap as they sit on an a roadside bench, waiting for cars to remember this part of the world exists and zip by, leaving clouds of city detritus in their wake. No cars pass. This Yuta predicts. Mark repeats his question; this too, doesn’t surprise Yuta. He’s lived here for so long he can map out their small town’s motor ticks, each raspy exhale from its stuttering lungs.

Despite this, Mark’s smile still thrills. 

“ _Because_ , darling,” Yuta croons, at Mark’s wilting expression; even like this, his childhood sweetheart still manages to make each exchange feel brand-new. He could pass the day, just like this. He lets the moon phases turn with ease. 

“Seriously, though.” Mark scuffs his shoes against Yuta’s ankles. The road remains undisturbed. “Like, it still boggles me, you know? I mean, there’s you—and then, there’s _me_ —and I’m just—“

“We live in the middle of Satan’s armpit, Mark, it’s not like I had a lot to work with here.”

“ _Hyung_.”

“I’m kidding. I told you. I like shiny things,” Yuta assures him, thumbing his sharp cheek. Leaning in, he says, soft as secrets should be, “You’re very shiny, Mark Lee. I had no choice in the matter.”

Mark considers this, smiling faintly. His hand feels soft in Yuta’s grip, almost weightless. Lately, Mark drifts into daydreams more and more in Yuta’s arms, and Yuta holds him through it, when he begins to float halfway out the interstate, where Yuta can't reach him, like a helium balloon fit to bursting. 

“Aw,” Mark tells him eventually. “That’s pretty gay though.”

Yuta laughs and pinches his cheek until Mark winces and yelps. That’s what he gets. Yuta wishes Mark would stop asking these stupid questions, because why else would Yuta love him? Like saying you loved the ocean only to be asked to label which droplet was your favorite. _Stupid_. Yuta loves him, every part of him. The salt on his neck from dance classes, his too-sharp elbows, his comical, bird-in-flight eyebrows—all the heady atmosphere of a boy he can get. Want is a powerful thing. It widens and makes room. Yuta has learned to love in totality.

* * *

Lately Mark’s been frugal with sun, slumping into their bed as soon as he gets home from classes while Yuta hacks away at an article for the agency he works at part-time. When Mark doesn’t turn, Yuta pulls his glasses off and follows him.

“Baby, hey,” Yuta urges. Turning Mark over, he finds the front of his shirt soaked through with cold sweat. “Are you feeling okay?”

Mark lets himself be pulled up to sit. He's sluggish, almost like his limbs are trapped in amber. “I… don’t know.” His tongue, too, is thick with it. “May be coming down with something, I think.”

Yuta dabs the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and frowns. “I told you, stop with the all-nighters. You need rest.”

Mark shakes his head. “It’s not that. It’s—I don’t know.” Up close, Mark’s cheeks are splotches of color. There’s dirt on his shirt too, giving off a deep, miasmic smell. Did he tumble into a field? 

Yuta asks him this. Instead of answering, Mark sways, eyes coming unfocused for a little bit, until they land on Yuta and he returns, no longer an impression of a boy. “Hyung,” he says. “Yuta-hyung.”

“Yes, Mark?”

“Do you ever feel like—weird in your body?”

Yuta’s hands pause on his forehead. “Um. Sometimes?”

“I just,” Mark is saying, “I don’t feel like… myself, lately, is all.”

Yuta frowns, nodding. “I’m sorry, baby. Let’s get you changed out of those clothes, yeah? You’ll feel better.”

He leaves Mark on the bed to fetch a fresh shirt, boxers, and a small towelette from their walk-in closet on the other end of the room—only to promptly drop everything when he returns.

“Sorry,” Mark gasps. He’s lying stomach-down, canting his hips against the mattress, chasing friction. Both his hands white-knuckle on the sheets. His breath is a loud staccato-pulse in the room. “Sorry, I just felt really good—“

“Oh my god,” Yuta says. Lets Mark drag him down between his legs, marooning him on the altar of his body, so Mark can crash and swell and sink in Yuta’s arms. Sometimes Mark gets like this, cocooning his body into liquid heat, and Yuta cups and cups until he can’t hold anything else. Mark pants against his ear, bites down on Yuta’s shoulder with abandon.

“Sorry,” Mark keeps repeating, “I just—ah—I just—“

“It’s okay,” Yuta says, always. “I got you.”

When Mark presses hard into him, Yuta’s hands scramble for fingerholds. Mark twines their hands, only to fling Yuta’s arms back around his neck, his back, anywhere Yuta’s nails can sink in, and begs, “Harder, _please_ ,” like he wants the skin to break.

And oh, Yuta wants him like this too. The soft give of a body making way for something grand. It would be a beautiful thing.

* * *

“You’re beautiful,” Yuta tells him. Mark doesn’t believe it. Yuta kisses him again, loves him, rocks against him, begging to be believed. “You’re beautiful,” he repeats, “it’s true. You grow more and more beautiful each day. Can’t you see?”

Mark angles his face away, cheek pressed into the pillow. A shadow of shame perches on his shoulder. “I’m sorry. I don’t—“ he goes quiet. “I don’t know why I did that.”

“That’s okay. Hey.” Mark lets his face be turned. “It’s okay. I promise.”

“Thank you.” And then: “Love you, hyung,” Mark says thickly, fingers knotting over his shirt, the salt from his neck prickling over Yuta’s own tongue, “so, so much.”

Yuta smiles softly. “Me too.”

They hold each other until the night scrapes against the windows. Yuta presses against him, wanting their bodies to merge until the space between them winks out, until he can reach deep and dig Mark out of his skin. It’s never close enough.

Outside the blinds, the moon is a gnawed bone. 

* * *

Lately, Yuta wakes at odds hours to find Mark watching the sky shift outside the blinds with wary eyes. Tonight there is a waning gibbous moon, shaped like something somebody had taken a big bite out of, then saved for later. Yuta can hear it rattle.

“I had a stupid dream,” Mark whispers suddenly. Yuta thinks about Renjun's text message earlier: _mark seemed off again today, take care of him please?_ Mark says, wry, “You found somebody else. You were—happy.”

“That _does_ sound pretty stupid,” Yuta says. He pulls the covers up over Mark’s thighs, but even then Mark shivers, eyes clouding over. Still watching.

“Because—sometimes, you look at me and—" Mark heaves in a shaking breath. “There's no one else? Right?”

“Of course not,” Yuta says, frowning. Sometimes, Mark gets like this, all scorned and apprehensive, as the days turn. “You’re scaring me. All these crazy ideas. Who’s telling you this shit, huh?” Mark doesn’t gift this with a response. Sighing, Yuta rises to press his chest against Mark’s back and promises, desperately, “It’s only you, okay? Only you.” He keeps repeating it, until Mark’s eyelids droop and light seeps behind the blinds and Yuta is alone in his wanting: “Only you. Only you. Love you. All of you.”

* * *

Mark is wonderful. But lately—well, Yuta doesn’t know what to call what Mark is like lately. Something unimaginable. Treading the line between boy and something else. Yuta would have to invent the word for it.

Sometimes, Mark disappears in their house, and it sends Yuta into a panic, because the last time he found him asleep on the roof, his fingers numb and dark, his phone abandoned in the grass below. Sometimes, Mark passes a mirror and something stills in it, just long enough to send a grin Yuta’s away. And then it’s gone. And Yuta is alone.

Lately, Yuta wakes at night to hear Mark’s ragged breathing over his face, like an animal that should not exist, before he quiets into his arms, the sweet boy he loves, backstroking into another dream. 

The moon is always thinner in the morning.

Yuta wonders about the extent of his affection. Wonders how long he can follow this down. Renjun calls him and says, _seriously, I’m worried about mark, he hasn’t been coming to class,_ and it takes all of Yuta’s strength to keep his voice steady, say, _he’s just going through a slump_. _let’s just keep supporting him_

Tonight, when he hears Mark’s telltale stirring beside him, the duvet pushed down to their ankles, Yuta stands and follows Mark quietly as he leaves their bed, drifts down the dim hallway, movements slow and listless, until he rounds the corner and disappears. 

Softly at first, comes the sound. Yuta thinks it could paper crinkling, until he notices the wet wrenching of fabric, then the _pop_ , like matchsticks snapping underfoot, the unmistakable squelch of something tearing—

His heart jumps into his throat as Yuta turns the corner;

And finds Mark changing out of his shirt. 

His eyes are half-lidded. Sleepwalking. Yuta almost slumps to his feet.

It’s okay. Everything is okay. It’s just Mark. His Mark.

Yuta walks back to their bed, where sleep evades.

* * *

“I think,” Yuta decides, “it’s time.”

Mark hums and looks up at him, from where he sits on the floor, legs splayed out, mouth ajar and trailing saliva. Yuta bends down and wipes his jaw, tilting it closed, then gathers Mark’s wrists in one hand before his fingers can scratch welts into his own thighs. 

“Mm?”

“You need to get some sun. Fresh air. See actual people.” Yuta pulls him up and deposits him on the edge of their bed. Mark goes easily, watching him with wonder. “Tonight. We leave tonight, kay? I’m taking you away from here. We’ll see the city, dance a little bit, maybe drink some fancy wine—I don’t know, don’t get too excited yet. I don't know if my wallet can afford any city bars, but tonight is special, right?” Yuta cups his cheek. “Wouldn’t you like that? We could have so much fun.”

A slow, dopey smile blooms on Mark’s face. “I’ll go anywhere you wanna go, hyung.”

“Sap,” Yuta teases. Sometimes Mark gets like this, half here and elsewhere; Yuta loves him like this, too. Want is powerful like that; it passes through the verge. 

Yuta takes out his brushes, blush, eyeliner, and dolls him up, the way Mark likes, until his edges are sharp and sinister, like something that should not exist.

“How do I look?” Mark says. Yuta wants and wants and wants.

“Beautiful,” Yuta replies truthfully.

Mark’s grin is a sickle-smile. “Good.”

* * *

The lights of this club are embryonic, pulsing as if built inside a heart itself, or unhurriedly licked pliant by orange flames. Each step they take descending the basement is a second Mark emerges more into his body. His eyes are now clear and welling-wild. The jut of his hip dangerous. 

Down here, Mark comes alive. The thumping bass carries notes of vodka and blood-slick heat, incubated by other beautiful bodies. Yuta slumps against the bar, watching Mark amble into the dance floor. Yuta has always known; Mark is the shiniest of them all. He watches Mark dance. Sway. Twirl like a scintillating flame. 

Faster and faster.

He almost looks like—

* * *

The story goes like this: in one childhood summer, Yuta watches a star fall.

It skims the tops of trees before crashing into the house across the street. 

The evening sky shreds itself with weeping. As if to say, not another one. Not again. 

Years later, when Yuta forgets the smell of sulfur, and there is a sweet boy he loves to occupy the days; when the walls are blackening around him, crackling, and finally, _give_ , still pulling in fistfuls of smoke, does Yuta truly understand what it means to want in totality.

_It’s you_ , he thinks, falling into its mouth, _it’s always been you._

* * *

Here's how it begins:  
  
In the dark, it teaches him gentleness; it swallows him whole. 

How soft, Yuta wonders—long after the rescue, after his skin heals over and the house is rebuilt and the voice in the sky quiets into a drone—that heat. How something that lives to extinguish itself can give so completely.

* * *

The house is always on fire in the dream. 

Sometimes Yuta is in it. Sometimes Mark. Sometimes Yuta is with his family again, trapped under the wooden beams.

In this one, he is standing outside it, barefoot in the garden. 

Behind the door, comes the _scratch-scratch-scratch_ of nails frantically carving an exit, like a hundred wing beats against a cardboard cage. The flames lick up the grass, the gate, and the roof, but do not eat through it. The house seems preserved in holy fire. 

Somewhere in the sky is a scream.

Yuta can’t quite decipher it. Oh well. More pressing matters to pursue. Like right now—

When someone is standing behind him. 

Maybe it’s been there all this time.  _Will you take me with you this time?_ The voice says.

Inside the house, the scratching stops. 

The moon screams, _Don’t_. So that’s what it’s been saying, Yuta thinks. For so long it spoke in a language only Mark could hear. 

_Everywhere you go_ , _I go_ , it says. _Everything you want—_

The flames around the house disappear. The world plunges into a deep darkness. The sky so black it is blue.

In Yuta's palm, a small flame winks into life.

_Everything you want, I want, too—you’re the same as me, aren’t you?_

Staring at the flame, Yuta feels, for the first time in his life, such a keen sense of joy bubbling up in him. How miraculous, to find something as hungry as yourself, even in the purgatory of this backwater town.

_I want to be the only one._

Yuta shakes his head. This he cannot promise. Anything but this. There is someone else, after all. A sweet boy made of history.

Suddenly, the sky droops with ink and warning. Before him, the door of the house cracks open. 

_That’s okay,_ the voice says; the skin on Yuta’s hand bubbles from the flame, but he cannot feel it. _I can share. I’ll take him down too._

Please, Yuta thinks. Wherever that is, it's there he wants to go. An elsewhere that is soft and kind and brilliant with light. Mark would like it there, too; they deserve more than this nowhere town.

* * *

In the murk of their room, Mark traces the pale ribbons of skin on Yuta’s thigh and whispers, “Thank you, thank you,” kissing everywhere his lips can reach.

Yuta tilts his face up. “Who you talking to?”

“God,” Mark says. He’s trembling. “He saved you. He brought you back to me.”

Yuta hums. He holds Mark’s cheek, heavy and sweet like a peach. “No.” He shakes his head. “God didn’t save me. I think you did, though.”

Mark scoffs. “Don’t be stupid.”

“It’s true. You saved me long ago. The moment I met you, I—“

“You’re so—“ 

“Sexy?”

“Stupid,” Mark repeats, and their mouths clash, then move with intention. Yuta dips his hand boldly between Mark’s thighs, and it isn’t long before Mark is rocking between his legs, peering over his shoulder with dark eyes to watch Yuta disappear into his body, using Yuta’s thighs to rock up, then down. Like a blinded man, Yuta feels for Mark’s heartbeat, palm flat between his shoulder blades, where a pulse thrashes beneath the spine like a stunned bird. His hand curls into a claw. Yuta imagines digging it out, quick—all of Mark’s grief, all his human sadness—like fishing a salmon out a creek. 

Yuta left that burning wreck with a newfound peace; he wants Mark to find it, too.

Mark comes, and the air trembles with the afterbirth of something.

* * *

Mark stumbles out the club, into the cool city air with the night furled back, all its thousand stars shrieking down at them. A lexicon of light. Yuta catches him before he slips, grinning. 

“Did you have fun?” Yuta says, throwing away his cigarette. “Find something shiny?” 

In the dark, Mark nods. His clenched fist gleams darkly. 

“Show me?” 

Mark opens his fist. He’s almost shy about it. “This guy said I looked nice,” he says as Yuta peers down at the offering. “I said his teeth looked even nicer.”

“Damn,” Yuta whispers. Mark begins to reach into his pockets. “There’s _more_? You had a lot of fun. Fuck.”

“Tonight is special,” Mark reasons, and Yuta agrees, “Yes. Yes it is.”

* * *

Yuta lights a candle, one for each corner of their bedroom, and it bathes the walls in a womblike shroud. The air pulses with meaning. Yuta washes Mark, towels him down, then lays him out on their bed where a strip of moonlight cracks his face in two. Yuta pours oils down his chest, thighs, feet—oils that make the heat rise and prickle the skin, and soon Mark is singing, high and breathy, with each stroke of Yuta’s tight fist. 

Beside them on the bed are Mark’s offerings. They darken the sheet.

“You’re so beautiful.” Yuta trails open kisses down his hip, following the trail of soft hair to the delicate patch of skin right before he curves hot and heavy. “Tonight, I need you to let go for me. Can you do that?”

“Hyung, I—“ he pauses. Mark’s eyes are swallowed by black. “What’s happening to me?”

“You’re waking up,” Yuta tells him kindly, then swallows him down.

* * *

Mark bucks and moans and scratches his sides. Sometimes Mark gets like this, teetering between the phases, and the fearful animal in him bares its face, fierce in its protectiveness. Yuta lets his chest be mauled, searching his bedside drawer for a few seconds, before capturing Mark's mouth and holding him down.

There’s a _click_.

Mark stops and looks up. His left wrist is cuffed to the bedpost.

“Hyung?”

“I can't have you scratching your eyes out,” Yuta says. “You're a menace like this, you know that?”

Perhaps it’s the cool metal against his skin that shocks him, sends him backpedaling towards wakefulness. “Hyung. What’s—what’s happening to me? I don’t know—help me. Please, help me—“

“I’m sorry,” Yuta hears himself say. The sound of Mark begging shatters something essential in him. “I’m sorry,” and it turns into a choked sob. “But I miss him. I miss him so much. If you knew how long I've waited..."

The cuffs clang loudly as Mark struggles. “You’re making me go away,” he says, realizing. 

"Markie—"

"Please—please don't make me go—"

“Just for one night,” Yuta promises him, catching Mark's flailing hand and pressing a kiss into it. He gestures out the blinds, where the moon is a thin, curved wick. "Just tonight—it's the only time—"

“It’s cold over there,” Mark begs, clinging. “Hyung, it’s so cold.”

“I know, baby. I know. But you won't be alone. I’ll meet you there, okay? I promise." He holds Mark until he quiets and nods, and Yuta tucks Mark's hair proudly behind his ear. "I told you. It's only you. All of you."

* * *

Yuta slips off the bed. Locks the door.

Mark has gone quiet for a long time.

And then—softly at first, comes the sound of paper—of skin, shifting aside—and Mark unwraps himself like a gift.

Outside, the moon is bathed in birth.

* * *

The air warps inside their bedroom. Phasing from heat to ice. Then thawing into plumes of smoke.

Two eyes open in the dark. 

The first breath is a crackle of ancient fire.

“Yuta, boy,” says the voice, pleased and calling him forth.

Emerging from the doorway, Yuta presses a knee into the bed to greet him. The cuffs _click,_ fall to the floor. Their hands tangle. 

“Minhyung,” Yuta says, relief pooling in his mouth like blood, as he shakes and drapes himself over his lap. “Oh. Minhyung.”

How soft; this heat. These blackened hands that run down his back, cup his face, brand his thighs. Holding them together.

“Yuta,” Minhyung grins, his head tilting. “Are you mine, boy?” 

Yuta melts into his arms. “Always. Yours, yours, _yours_.” 

Yuta has waited many nights. Has watched the moon cross over for this meeting. Learned to bind entity in his lover’s beautiful name, saving them both. Want is a powerful thing. It widens and makes room.

They touch, and the moon burns for a very long time.

🌘

**Author's Note:**

> just mark, yuta, and their ancient fire demon boyfriend amirite


End file.
